Slaughterhouse Intimacies

Abstract

Abstract: This essay traces slaughterhouse intimacies, sites of material entanglement between and among species, gender, race, sexuality, and reproduction. The phrase may seem paradoxical: the slaughterhouse is a line of death and dismemberment; intimacy connotes vital connection, private interiority. Yet the history of industrial animal farming, I argue, traffics between the intimateexchanges of gender, race, and species at the slaughterhouse, an institution that binds species to reproductive control, alters how animals are known, and changes the tempo and scale of violence itself—making the unthinkable possible. Two strands of scholarship recruit animals or species to comprehendviolations of human-based difference. Second-wave feminists often recruitedan analogic comparison between animals and women to outlinethe contours of a sexism that treats women like animals. The burgeoning field of Black animality studies has focused attention on the race-as-species metaphor in the history of scientific racism. Yet little attention has been paid to the material pathways through which industrial farming changed the entanglements of race, species, and gender. By close reading Ruth Ozeki's novel, My Year of Meats (1998), I unpack the material connectionslying beneath metaphorical comparisons and trace the circulation of U.S. meat through global circulation networks that produce and reproduce our notions of gender, race, time, species, sexuality, and reproduction.